


Unchanging

by Mangacat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 05:23:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangacat/pseuds/Mangacat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in a conundrum. Everybody who knows anything knows of Sam Winchester, but nobody knows him. Not really. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Unchanging

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quickreaver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quickreaver/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sam - Man of Letters](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/20963) by quickreaver. 



> Spoilers: thematic spoilers for season 8, specifically starting 8x12
> 
> A/N: I was just staring at that challenge quickreaver set us with her call for fic to complement her insanely hot pic of Sam and I couldn’t resist. It’s an unbetaed, extremely late to the party and incoherent mess, but that’s the beauty of it.

He’s a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in a conundrum. Everybody who knows anything knows of Sam Winchester, but nobody knows him. She’s not sure she’s better off that way and she’s been under his tutelage for close to ten years now, living in the headquarters of the not-so-secret society that holds all the most precious bits of knowledge that the men of letters were able to acquire over aeons. She feels at home among the shelves and reading tables, save in the fortress that won’t let anything in that does not belong, even if she shares it with the most dangerous man on the planet.

Their relationship is an odd one. It started when Sam Winchester stepped into her life a couple of days after her family was spread around her home in a mess of blood and viscera by…something. She was just about to vanish into the system with a whole host of traumatic images burnt into her eyes, no idea what made her special enough to be left over and no hope to ever grow up into a halfway functional human being. He gave the social worker very convincing proof that he was her mother’s younger brother – though her mother had been an only child as long as she’d lived. He had opened the passenger door of a black monster of a car for her as she stood on the sidewalk and waited patiently, sitting with his arms slung leisurely over the steering wheel, for as long as it took her to decide whether she was getting in or not.

To this day she doesn’t really know why she did, throwing her duffel on the backseat and closing the passenger door behind her with a resounding thud. It seemed utter madness, a fifteen year old girl driving off with a stranger whose name she hadn’t even learned yet. She did, eventually of course; also learned what the name Sam Winchester meant to the right people, though the Winchester gospel is more legend than truth these days, even among the seasoned hunters of the community. She has seen many different sides of him since she placed her completely baseless trust in him all those years ago, but she’s not sure whether that has taken her closer to the truth or the legend.

Buried nose-deep in the transcription of a couple of ancient tomes spread out in a coordinated chaos of velum and notepads all over the central reading table, she barely notices Sam stalking by towards the staircase to the gallery, wearing only a pair washed out jeans. He is running hot again today, she can tell by the thin sheen of sweat covering his bare back, making the ink on his arms gleam. Those days are getting more and more frequent and she doesn’t know whether to be worried about it or not. Wonders if all hell is trying to break loose with more fervor than usual. He must know that her eyes are following him now, but doesn’t acknowledge her save for a sideways glance past the broad rim of his old-fashioned glasses. His silhouette is magnificent in the light washing in through the bay window that overlooks everything on the hill, but strangely cannot be seen from outside and her breath catches in her throat for a second when she hears the snick of a lighter and sees smoke filtering into the red morning sunlight.

She had of course had a massive crush on him in the early years because of displays like this, all teenage hormones and displaced hero worship. He had put that on ice quickly by telling her just how way too young she was. Now that her age is so much closer to his looks, there is aesthetic appreciation and familiar affection and the knowledge that you don’t fall for a man that was there more than a lifetime before your birth and will be there many more after your death since he holds the fate of the world in balance. That is not even taking into account how the space of all his heart is occupied by another, long gone and yet still lingering.

She asked him once, it feels like years ago by now, who it was that captured his heart so thoroughly that he couldn’t find a place in it for anyone else and he looked at her with that piercing gaze that made her feel like he was sifting through her thoughts and scouring her soul. She still remembers vividly how the bottom fell out of her stomach from the trepidation and she wanted to move so badly all of a sudden that she was out of the chair without conscious thought a moment later. She would have bolted from the room, probably run out of the bunker and never come back if Sam hadn’t caught her wrist and stood to tuck her away to a side exit. She was so shocked about the unexpected touch, his fingers searing hot into her skin, that she let herself be led without question, down into the deep dark catacombs of headquarters that no one but Sam really knows how to navigate.

They had entered a large circular room that was much too big not to be very far underground, but she couldn’t remember going down at any point. However, she still recalls with perfect clarity how Sam had stopped abruptly in the arched doorway, but let go of her wrist so that she stumbled into the room and was halfway at the dais in the center before she could turn around glare him reproachfully. He had motioned her to move forward to the center instead, where she found the shape on the dais to be a man, close to Sam in age at least from the looks of it, beautiful and pale, his chest not even moved by the whisper of a breath. She had kept staring as Sam began to talk of the gates of hell and the ritual that closed them, the three trials that were needed to seal all the denizens of hell away forever. How he had bathed in the blood of a hellhound and brought a soul up from the depths of the pit. How each step closer changed him, turned his body into a conduit in which the threads of every single entrance to the dimension of hell ran together, a lock that could close all the doors at once.

How the last trial, the hardest and most impossible task of all was to reap the soul of the living Death to make it into the key that sealed the lock and shut the gates of Hell. She had mumbled some inane thing about understanding how difficult it must have been to find someone who was living and Death at the same time. But that just drew a mirthless laugh from Sam who then told her how his brother had once become the Grim Reaper for a day to get his soul back out of a cage in the deepest circle of Hell. Irony is still a bitch no matter which way you turn it and the Winchesters have experienced that more than anyone. The weight of what Sam had done to shut the demons of hell away forever and keep new souls out of the eternal torment had settled slowly on her mind just then. One unchanging in life and the other unchanging in death, holding a precarious balance in check. She looked down onto the still form in front of her and knew that they would never be together again.

In that moment she also understood why she was there. As Sam’s connection to humanity, his anchor, a reminder of what the world would be like if his strength faltered and he gave up.

She isn’t sure were those musings come from today of all days, but they drive her away from her work and up the stairs to join Sam on the gallery. She studies his face in an attempt to get a read on his thoughts, but comes up empty. She looks at his forearm where the inked feather of a peacock sports a new barb, fresh ink reddening the skin around it. She’s seen it before, when it was the one right across shining red and new. It had appeared not long after she first met Sam, a decade ago. Suddenly her breath catches in her throat and she refuses to count them out, all the barbs that make up the feather that’s sunk into Sam’s skin, but she understands.

She touches it lightly, half surprised that her fingertips aren’t hit by static and Sam looks at her sharply with his slanted eyes. A gaze she doesn’t dare hold too long for she feels like she can see the fires of Hell burning in them if she just looks deep and long enough.  
“How many more?”  
Sam flicks his cigarette so that the ashes slowly float to the ground. She thinks after a long moment that he isn’t going to say anything in return. It’s not as if she doesn’t know the answer anyway.  
“As many as it takes.”  
She thinks about the weight of that burden, the sacrifice, the still form lying in the depths of this place and vows to be whatever he needs in the absence of all that he wants.  
A confindante, a companion, a conscience, a guardian.  
He settles his hand over hers briefly, a caress like an afterthought before he turns and walks downstairs without another word.  
She watches the last of the smoke dissipate into the air and turns to go back to work.  
One day in the well of all knowledge in all the worlds through all the times she will find a way to wake Dean without breaking the spell.  
What is, after all, more important than reuniting family?

 

 

FIN 


End file.
